


my mother, the tree

by orphan_account



Category: JCU (Jelpus Cinematic Univede), Jelpus
Genre: Backstory, filling in the canon gap, jelloys has a mother, what happened to Jelpus' mother?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28322760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: They say they know the story. Jelloys Jelpus, the hero of the land, the saviour of the memepocalypse.But does anyone know the story of before?---OR what happened to Jelloys Jelpus' mother?
Kudos: 1





	my mother, the tree

They say they know the story. Jelloys Jelpus, the hero of the land, the saviour of the memepocalypse. 

But does anyone know the story of before? 

When the man was simply a boy. 

This is that story. A simple one.

It is the story of a boy who loved his mother. 

And a mother who was lost for all time. 

…

She does not have a name. 

In all those cheering crowds, their refrains and glorious celebrations when Jelloys returns, victorious. They celebrate but they do not know, they cannot know. 

No one says her name. They can’t, because no one knows it. 

Jelloys watches and counts the days on the old calendar over the open flame in the hut beside the smithy. 

‘Jelloys,’ Crumpkin says. He steps into the room. Jelloys does not turn from the calendar. 

‘It’s today.’ 

‘What is today?’ says Crumpkin, still half shadow in the hut doorway. 

Jelloys, hands still scarred and healing from the final encounter with the Why Martin cult, does not move. 

His eyes linger on the small boxed dates. Today is his victory. Today he is the saviour. Today they have cheered his name as he returned from the war. 

Even Crumpkin, the most loyal Crumpkin, does not know. 

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jelloys says. 

What Crumpkin does not know is that the day of victory is also Jelloys’ mother’s birthday. 

...

She was born not far from the Shia Lands, a few days before the Day of Elk.  
They christened her Tricago. She was born under a blue moon as her parents fled the Lashing bandits that had razed their village to the ground. 

It was a story that, later, she did not tell her son. 

She did not tell him of the fires that would haunt her memories for years, the villages that crumbled to nothingness under the orders of Ock D’dn, the decades of torment and suffering that pockmarked her childhood like the shell-holes that studded the ground as they roamed from place to place searching for safety. 

She only told him of the later days, after she had lost her parents to the forge of fire that was the battle of seshlehem, victims of the slaughter of the hoya at the hands of Ock D’dn. 

Of how she had been saved by the Pipeman of Plumberton. 

… 

‘Pluto,’ she asked later, when they were older and they watched their sons running in the snow, not knowing of the future that lay before them, ‘why did you save me?’ 

Pluto stood in the doorway and turned to her. 

He looked at her and they both were thinking about that day - the flames, the agony, the wounds that had taken a summer to heal - the way Pluto had reached in and lifted her away, the way he still had the scars now on the insides of his wrists. 

‘Why wouldn’t I have saved you?’ he asked. 

She stood next to him. Their sons, their two boys, who would grow up like brothers, were laughing and using sticks as swords as the cold air blew in clouds around them. 

‘My friend,’ she said, ‘thank you.’ 

‘You would have done the same.’ 

…

But that is not yet. That reflection did not come until those long hot final days, when Tricago knew the end was near. 

When reflection was all she had left. When she knew her boy would be left alone to face an uncertain future. 

ut Bfirst: 

a son. a boy with a miracle at his heart. 

…  
Jelloys’ father - the man whose name he carried with him everyday - was named Jelpluajb Jelpus. 

He stole in like the night when Tricago was nineteen. They would go together to the Pub Ole, and celebrated the Day of Elk side by side, watching the fireworks over the water. They danced together under the lights and counted up the stars. 

But, as a jack of trades, Jelpluajb never stayed anywhere for long. Just a month after he arrived, he went away on the next itinerant truck to the mines of Procrastination Creek. He promised he would not forget her. 

They wrote each other long letters, staying up late into the night. 

Months after Jelpluajb had stolen into her life, Tricago had discovered she was expecting. 

He never met his son. 

Pluto received the word. An official correspondence from the mine owners, sent to him for they had no address for Tricago. 

There had been a collapse at the mine. Jelpluajb and four others had perished. 

...

The boy had his father’s eyes. 

Tricago cried and cradled her son. 

She promised to tell him stories of her father from those brief, beautiful weeks they had spent together. 

She gave her boy his father’s name. 

She called him Jelloys Jelpus.  
...

But Jelpluajb was not Tricago’s love, for it was love that would damn her in the end. 

Tricago’s fate was sealed the moment she fell. 

…

Her name was Meme-or-yah. She was a travelling sorceress, one of the first who would foretell the prophecy that would damn or save Tricago’s boy as the saviour of all lands. 

She arrived in the village in a wagon train from the Lashing-lands strongholds, part of the wave of displaced persons from the purge of Seshlehem, yet more casualties of Ock D’dn’s crazed tyrannical regime. 

Pluto, as head councilman of the village, was placed in charge of housing the new refugees. it was him, therefore, who brought Tricago and Meme-or-yah together under the same roof for the first time. 

....

Meme-or-yah told Tricago, late one night when Jelloys was a lad, of the prophecies.

Later, the world would know of one, but not the other.

The world knew Jelloys would be fated to save the Univede from the memepocalypse. 

They did not know of the second.

They did not know about Tricago.

…

‘It is simple,’ the seer, Meme-or-yah said, ‘you must sacrifice yourself, or Jelloys will never fulfill his destiny.’ 

They were sitting on a sandbank, overlooking the sea. They were dreaming of Ancient Greese and a world that was not fated to destroy itself time after time. 

‘How can i trust you?’ Tricago cried. 

Meme-or-yah held out her hands. Tricago took them. They sat there, palm in palm. Meme-or-yah’s eyes were wide, watery; she took no joy in her words. 

‘Tricago,’ she said, ‘the fates, they speak to me. they are never wrong.’ 

‘Meme-or-yah…’  
‘They told me of the girl who was saved from fire, who loved the man who was buried in the mines, mother to the boy who will save the world.’ 

Meme-or-yah went quiet for a moment, then she looked back at Tricago’s face. Their eyes met. 

‘They told me of the mother who sacrifices herself to let her boy live, on the night of trees.’ 

…

And so the prophecy was told.

There would come a choice. 

Tricago or her boy. 

She knew what she would do. 

…

They lived quietly for a few more years, Tricago, meme-or-yah and the boy. hTey were happy. The world was stable enough. 

Then world came of Ock D’dn, his new forces in the west, the raiding parties he was sending out to strip the villages of their worth to aid his regime. 

Pluto was worried. 

But it was Tricago who acted. 

…

She created the defence forces. She manned the barricades night after night. She ordered the patrols and guided their progress. 

By the summer Jelloys was ten years old, Tricago had almost forgotten the prophecy; her life was taken up by protecting the village from Ock D’dn’s forces. 

…

Meme-or-yah had not forgotten. 

She knew of the night of trees.

She knew Tricago would not survive it. 

…

Jelloys demanded to be allowed out on the patrol. He was eleven years old. Tricago was weak when it came to her son. 

Meme-or-yah stayed silent and watched her love and the boy at the door. Shadows and secrets, a mother saying, ‘Just once,’ and not knowing she would regret it. 

There was nothing Meme-or-yah could say. The fates had spoken to her but she knew she could not change the way it would go.

It was the night of trees. 

And Tricago would not return. 

…

Ock D’dn burned the forest. 

Tricago’s forces ran and scattered. 

And a mother was calling into the trees for her boy to run. 

…

She stood firm, under the burning canopy. 

The soldiers stepped forward. 

Tricago did not move. 

They would not get her village.

They would not harm her boy. 

…

She fought as hard as she could.

The whispers were, later, that she slaughtered half of Ock D’dn’s forces, but that she was struck down where she stood: one blow to her hip, the second to her throat. 

The delay allowed the forces to reach the village and raise the alarm. 

Her blood on the forest floor, but the village lived. 

Jelloys lived. 

…

They say a tree grew there, in the spot, where the blood settled on the carpet of leaves. 

Jelloys heard the story many times in his childhood. 

Meme-or-yah, who raised him, would take him there. They would stand there, in the forest, where his mother had repelled Ock D’dn’s forces. 

By the time he was eighteen, the stories had disappeared. All there was the whisper about the tree, the magic tree. 

And a boy without a mother who would save the world. 

…

On her birthday, not long before the Day of Elk, when Jelloys stood in the hut and Crumpkin asked him what was up, he said it was nothing.

But when the night falls and he cannot sleep, he goes out there, to the woods, and kneels on the forest floor, and lays his hands on the bark. 

‘Mother,’ he says. ‘I did it, mother.’ 

The wind whistles. 

In the morning, it is Meme-or-yah who finds him there. 

Who holds him and says, ‘She would be so proud of you, her boy.’ 

… 

And so that is the story. 

Of the mother without a name. 

It is the story of a boy who loved his mother. 

And a mother who was lost for all time.


End file.
